Winter Hazards IV

It’s finally warm out!  So naturally…

Chunks of melting ice fall off roof tops and crush cars below.

All the Pretty Horses

The water was black and warm and he turned in the lake and spread his arms in the water and the water was so dark and so silky and he watched across the still black surface to where she stood on the shore with the horse and he watched where she stepped from her pooled clothing so pale, so pale, like a chrysalis emerging, and walked into the water.

She paused midway to look back. Standing there trembling in the water and not from the cold for there was none. Do not speak to her. Do not call. When she reached him he held out his hand and she took it. She was so pale in the lake she seemed to be burning. Like foxfire in a darkened wood. That burned cold. Like the moon that burned cold. Her black hair floating on the water about her, falling and floating on the water. She put her other arm about his shoulder and looked toward the moon in the west do not speak to her do not call and then she turned her face up to him. Sweeter for the larceny of time and flesh, sweeter for the betrayal. Nesting cranes that stood singlefooted among the cane on the south shore had pulled their slender beaks from their wingpits to watch. Me quieres? she said. Yes, he said. He said her name. God yes, he said.

– pg. 141

Windmill Day

I can see pretty far on a clear day from my apartment on the third floor facing north and northeast of town.   Three stories is as tall as houses get around these parts so it’s a view that just skims the rooftops.  In the summer I saw my neighbors garden in their backyard, their straw hats bobbing among the thick greens.  In the fall once on my fire escape I watched as three points of light circled the Boston skyline: silent, eerie, like something not from this world, and I, too, had the sudden feeling that I was only passing through.  In winter I watched as it snowed from a single cloud in the sky on an otherwise clear blue day.

Among the things I see from my apartment is a windmill.  It’s in the top picture: that white thing in the distance, under the power lines, over the highway.  I read some about windmills then.  How a single windmill can generate enough power for a thousand homes.  I decided I like windmills.  They are colossal and useful and this one tells me if it’s a windy day and reminds me of better times.

Today around dusk I decided it was time to visit this windmill.  I took my bike and started in that direction.  I didn’t pay too much attention to where I was turning and such, when I would go over a hill, I would see it again and then I would take the street that most nearly headed in its direction.  I imagined myself standing under this windmill and looking up at its giant arms turning.  I imagined it’d be in the center of some big green field.

The ride took me to the industrial part of town.  And then it dead-ended at the bus depot.  Just over the bridge, where bikes were not allowed, over a shallow river, behind a chain-linked fence, was the windmill.  Next to it was a crane hauling something around maybe building up some new structure.   So this was as close as I could get today.

I gotta get a car.

Today I learned

Today I learned that hair does not stop growing.  When it reaches its maximum length, it just falls out and a new hair grows in its place.  With hair follicles, there is only the growing stage and the dormant stage.  And the duration of these stages is different for each person, and different for different parts of the body.  Every few years, every hair on your head is replaced, like every skin cell is replaced, like most every other atom in your body.

What happens when the world ends but the people don’t die all at once?

Borrowed The Road from the library.

He remembered waking once on such a night to the clatter of crabs in the pan where he’d left steakbones from the night before. Faint deep coals of the driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind. Lying under such a myriad of stars. The seas’ black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.

p.185.

Not my genre generally. For how wildly popular he is I’ve never read any Cormac McCarthy before this.